Analysis of ‘Jaws’

Jaws is a novel by Peter Benchley, published in 1974 and adapted the next year by Steven Spielberg into a movie that starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, and costarring Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton.

While it is more usual to say that a book is better than its movie adaptation, it is almost universally felt that the reverse is the case with Jaws. The novel’s characters are generally felt to be unlikeable and unsympathetic, and so the changes made to them for the film are justified. Also, while the film streamlines and simplifies the plot to focus on the shark threat, the novel does a detour in the middle to make it into a character study, focusing on their conflicts.

Now, while I would agree that the film is far more entertaining than the novel–indeed, the film established the notion of the summer blockbuster–there are important thematic elements in the novel, only lightly touched on in the film, that deserve a more thorough exploration, so I’ll be focusing on the novel a lot here…without neglecting the film, of course.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to an audiobook of the novel, whose quirky AI narrator makes lots of amusing mispronunciations.

While the great white shark of the film is just a menace to be defeated, the shark of the novel, somewhat like the white whale of Moby-Dick, is symbolically a force of nature ready to fight back against a most predatory human race. Just as the crew of the Pequod hunt and kill whales as their way of making money (e.g., to get the oil), so do the people of the fictional town of Amity use the beaches and swimming as a way of making money, which can be seen as a human muscling in on the fish’s natural territory.

So the people in the novel are as much predators in their own way as the shark is. Indeed, predation in general is a major theme of the novel, something stripped away to a minimum in the film. When making the film, Spielberg famously said he’d been rooting for the shark as he was reading Benchley’s novel, since the characters were so unlikeable. I would argue, though, that the unlikeability of the characters was the whole point of the novel.

A careful reading of the book demonstrates a critique of capitalism that Spielberg and his fellow moviemakers were trying to shy away from…and in making not only the first summer blockbuster, but also a well-loved, classic film that has since raked in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide (the result of an aggressive marketing campaign that had included such merchandise as a soundtrack album, T-shirts, beach towels, blankets, toy sharks, etc.), they succeeded most admirably in making the film all for capitalism, rather than against it.

The film, while scary, gave viewers a sense of hope, whereas the novel is much darker in tone, giving us a sense of how much nastier we can be than sharks. Small wonder people like the movie so much more than the book.

I will go into the capitalist critique later on, in particular as regards the…business relationships…of Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), something removed from the film. For now, though, consider the reality of such things as the polluting of our oceans, which harms so much of marine life because proper disposal of garbage is more costly and eats into profits. Also, there’s the hunting of sharks for their fins to be eaten as a delicacy. Indeed, Benchley later regretted how the Jaws phenomenon led to hostility to a marine animal that doesn’t attack humans all that much, thus making him preoccupied with marine conservation and protecting sharks. As I said above, man is every bit the predator that sharks are, if not much more so.

An understanding of that reality can help us to see how, on a symbolic level, people going out to swim in the waters of Amity Beach are intruding on the territory of marine animals. So while in the movie, as well as in the novel, young Christine Watkins may be innocently skinny dipping, then to die a violent death, that is just our human point of view. From the shark’s point of view, too, she’s just its prey…killing her is of course nothing personal. But the shark, often called “the fish” in the novel, represents the vengeful wrath of nature against her human predators. On a couple of occasions in the novel, a resident of Amity claims that the shark is God’s agent of retribution for the town’s sins.

When police chief Martin Brody (Scheider) learns of the killing of Watkins, and that it was probably a shark attack, he wants to close down the beach to prevent any more attacks. The problem is that the summer tourist season has come, and the Amity economy depends almost entirely on tourism. Because of this problem, Vaughn and the town’s selectmen want news of the shark attack to be kept secret. And so the editor of the local newspaper, Harry Meadows (played by Carl Gottlieb, who also did rewrites of Benchley’s original script for the film, and whose role as Meadows was little more than a cameo, as opposed to Meadows’s much more substantial part in the novel), gives no reports of the attack.

Issues of class difference having an impact on the novel first become apparent in the dissatisfaction of Ellen Brody (Gary) with her marriage to Martin. Her family background is further up in terms of social class than his, so her having become the wife of a police chief feels as though she’s ‘married down.’ As a result, she feels alienated from the Amity community, who seem ‘beneath’ her, and when she meets Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss), an ichthyologist from a class echelon similar to hers–and whose older brother she once dated, years before knowing Martin–she develops a sexual interest in him. Needless to say, none of this is in the movie.

What must be understood here is that the unpleasantness of these characters (her lust, Hooper’s snottiness to Martin, his jealous suspicions of Hooper with his wife and resulting antagonism to him, etc.) is all part of the novel’s critique of class conflict and alienation, all products of capitalism, which in turn is an important part of the overall theme of predation in the novel. Recall, in this connection, Einstein‘s words: “the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”

Because no one yet knows of the danger of the shark, some people go out to the beach for a swim. Brody is there, too, watching over the area just in case. A little boy named Alex Kintner goes into the water and is eaten by the shark; in the film, his blood is splashing with the water, the shock of it vividly captured in the famous dolly zoom of Brody’s reaction to the killing.

Because of technical difficulties with ‘Bruce,’ the mechanical shark used in the film, its appearance had to be limited. Spielberg was able to turn this problem into a virtue, however, by instead suggesting the shark’s presence: filming from its POV, using shadow, and having John Williams‘s famous music, with the E-F-E-F-E-F-E-F in the cellos, double basses, etc. The result was something incalculably scarier, with the sense of approaching danger.

When Alex’s mother (played by Lee Fiero) learns that Brody had known of the shark danger, yet let the beaches stay open, we see her approach him and slap him. In the film, her reaction is gentle compared to the rage she shows him in the novel, and it’s another example of how the film makes the characters more likable and sympathetic.

Still, despite Brody’s attempts to have the beach closed, especially since he’s racked with guilt over Alex’s death (Brody has sons of his own: two in the film, and three in the novel), Mayor Vaughn insists on keeping the beaches open for the sake of the summer season and the health of the town’s economy.

Now, in the film, Vaughn seems to be a well-intentioned, but short-sighted and foolish mayor, dismissing the shark threat and trivializing it in comparison to the, to him, far greater urgency of keeping the town’s economy healthy. In the novel, though, things get far more sinister and darker when we learn of his business dealings with the mafia.

In many posts, I’ve described the presentation of the mafia in film as symbolic of capitalists, since I consider the exploitation of labour to be criminal. The mafia’s criminal actions are illegal, with mainstream capitalists, their criminal actions are legal. In the Jaws novel, though, the mafia are literally capitalists, who have bought up local property at cheap prices and are hoping, during the summer tourist season, to sell it at much higher prices to get a nice profit.

So the mafia is pressuring Vaughn, who in turn is pressuring Brody, to keep the beaches open, with no regard whatsoever for the safety of the swimmers. The mafia at one point even kill the Brody family cat, which Brody angrily tries to blame on Vaughn. Now, Vaughn, incidentally, also needs money from the tourism to pay off some debts. So in all of these issues, we can see not only a sense of predation far greater than just that of the shark, but also how Benchley’s novel is a critique of capitalism.

In man’s muscling into the marine animals’ territory to make a profit, we can see how one of the residents of Amity considers the shark to be an agent of God’s retribution against the wicked.

Quint (Shaw) is introduced in the film far earlier than he is in the novel, which is just before he, Brody, and Hooper go out hunting for the shark. At a town meeting, where a $3,000 bounty is placed on the shark, the eccentric Quint, after scratching his fingernails on a chalkboard where a shark has been drawn (suggesting his Ahab-like hatred of the great white marine animal), he offers his own shark-hunting services for $10,000.

Other shark hunters go after the shark, but end up catching a different one, a tiger shark. At about 6:47 in this set of deleted scenes, we see not only their shark hunting, but also their rowdy competition with each other, hitting the butts of their rifles against other boats, throwing bait at rivals in other boats, foolishly taking their dogs in their boats, and recklessly firing their rifles into the water. Though the film managed to remove much of the novel’s human predation, this deleted scene demonstrates at least an attempt to compensate for those removals.

Because the shark seems to have been caught and killed, Vaughn confidently assures everyone it’s OK to come to Amity Beach and have a good time in the water. He reminds us that amity means “friendship,” though for those who know the town of the novel, the unlikeable characters imply that the town would be more aptly named ‘Enmity.’

Indeed, the sense of unfriendliness and alienation is so keenly felt in a reading of the novel that at times it’s to be noted even in the narration itself. Homophobic slurs pop up occasionally, and racist stereotypes are presented in the insistence that rapists in the town must be black. I suspect, in all fairness to Benchley, that these elements aren’t meant to be a reflection of his character, but are meant to be present in whoever is narrating the story, presumably a resident of Amity.

To get back to the film version, we note that people are on the beach again, though at first they’re nervous about going into the water. Vaughn has to urge an elderly couple to go in, to prod all the others to go in also, by imitative conformity. Brody has people patrolling the water, watching it like hawks in case the shark that had been caught was the wrong one.

Around this time, we see a TV news reporter saying a cheesy line about how Amity Beach has a cloud over it in the shape of a killer shark. This, by the way, is a cameo by none other than Peter Benchley himself (a former reporter for the Washington Post)…and one wonders if the clichéd line he speaks is meant to be a dig at the writer’s prose.

After a prank pulled by a couple of boys in the water, a false alarm that allows for some temporary relief in the tension, the shark really makes an appearance, killing a man, whose dismembered leg is seen floating down in the water, his blood mixing with it. Later, Vaughn is finally showing some remorse over his trivializing of the danger and his overconfidence that there was no more shark to worry about.

Around this time in the novel, Ellen has seen Hooper again, and with a tense dinner party in the Brody house, her predatory seduction of him begins. Martin, sensing the chemistry between them, is getting drunk and making things awkward for everyone.

After the party, she arranges to meet Hooper in a restaurant for lunch, and the flirtation between them continues. At one point, she makes an odd comment about having rape fantasies. While it is true that some women have these (though they’d be more accurately described as fantasies of being ravished or of having ‘good, rough sex,’ the word ‘rape’ being used here for its connotations rather than its denotative meaning, since ‘rape’ by definition is something one does NOT want to be subjected to), one cannot but be suspicious of the inner motives of a male novelist putting such fantasies in the mind of one of his female characters.

Still, as unseemly as such fantasies may be in Ellen’s mind, they do, in a way, fit in with the general theme of predation. If we see sexual predation and seduction as forms of sexual sadism, then ‘rape’ fantasies could be seen as examples of sexual masochism. Ellen, in this sense, would prey on Hooper and be preyed on by him. In this connection, note what Freud once said: “A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.” To paraphrase Freud, a predator is always at the same time prey. The shark will certainly be the prey of Brody, Hooper, and Quint.

Anyway, Ellen and Hooper will go to a hotel after their lunch date and prey on each other, as it were, in bed. Martin, in the meantime, will try to reach both of them by phone that afternoon, and being unable to do so, will feel his jealousy swelling in him.

Other examples of what could be called predation in Amity include some local scammers trying to take advantage of tourists, who want a glimpse of the notorious shark they’ve heard about in the media; the scammers will trick the tourists into buying unneeded tickets for admission to the beach! Brody finds out about this, and realizes he has to apprehend the scammers.

Finally, after a boy narrowly escapes being eaten by the shark, Brody closes the beach and convinces the town’s selectmen to hire Quint. Now, as we know, insanely jealous Brody and snotty rich kid Hooper are not likable (as opposed to their portrayal in the film, of course), but neither is the Quint of the novel, who disembowels a blue shark and uses an illegally caught unborn baby dolphin as bait, angering ichthyologist Hooper. Once again, we see man as much more of a predator than sharks are.

Now, while in the film there is some friction among the three men on Quint’s boat, the Orca (aptly named after the killer whale that is the natural enemy of the great white shark), such friction is expressed in a generally light-hearted manner. Recall Dreyfuss’s Hooper making faces at Quint after being told he can’t admit when he’s wrong.

In the novel, however, the friction among them gets much nastier, and this contributes to their unlikeability. As I mentioned above, neither Brody nor Quint likes snotty rich kid Hooper, and in this we see the alienation caused by class differences, caused in turn by capitalism. On top of that, Brody’s rising jealous suspicions of Hooper having played around with Ellen (also, as we’ve seen, a product of class differences) fill him with so much rage that at one point he physically attacks Hooper, strangling him for a moment.

While in the movie, the men go out in the Orca one time and confront the shark at the end, in the novel, they go out on four separate trips, each time returning to shore at the end of the day. They never see the shark on the first day, but they do on the second, and Brody is amazed at the size of it. In the film, his amazement can be related to the scene when he’s ladling chum into the water, the shark suddenly appears, shocking him, and he backs up and says the famous line to Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” (Incidentally, Scheider improvised the line.)

The third day is not only when Brody and Hooper have their fight, but also when Hooper brings the shark cage and, unlike in the film, he dies underwater in it when the shark attacks him. Now, he was originally supposed to die in the film that way, too, but footage filmed of a great white shark attacking the cage (with no one in it) looked so compelling to Spielberg that he wanted to use it, and this meant rewriting the scene so Hooper instead would escape and swim to safety on the ocean floor, then resurface with Brody, and together they swim to shore at the end. Besides, the problems with ‘Bruce’ were a constant source of changes to the story.

The fourth and final day, of course, is the final confrontation with the shark, both it and Quint dying, though the latter dies in a more Ahab-esque way, and the former in a far less…explosive…way. But I’ll come back to that in more detail later.

While in the film, there is some friction among the three men, there’s also a lot of camaraderie, which adds to their likability. This is especially so in the night-time scene on the Orca, when they have a few drinks and engage in male bonding in the form of Quint and Hooper comparing scars on their legs.

And it is at this point that we come to one of the most important film contributions to the story: Quint’s recollections of what happened to the crew of the USS Indianapolis. This incident really happened in 1945; the ship delivered the components of an atomic bomb to Tinian in a mission so secret that when the ship was sunk by Japanese torpedoes while on its way to Leyte, the Philippines, the navy was late to learn of the ship’s non-arrival in Leyte.

The surviving crew at the time were left adrift over an ordeal of several days, leaving them without food or water, to suffer from exposure to the elements that resulted in such problems as hypothermia. Then there were the shark attacks, which of course are the focus of Quint’s telling of the story, as well as the source of his Ahab-like hate of sharks.

Just as Captain Ahab, in his rage, tells his crew of when the white whale bit off his leg, so does Quint speak, though in a calm, sombre voice, of his trauma and fear from that ordeal in the water. The scene adds depth to his character, to help us sympathize with him, and also to add an Ahab relation to him in a way that Benchley’s attempts at such a relation come off as contrived and superficial in comparison.

There’s another thing that the Indianapolis story adds to Jaws: the element of capitalism’s muscling in on the sea, causing nature to get revenge on it in the form of shark attacks–God’s retribution on the sinful, as that Amity resident sees it.

The sending of the atomic bomb components to Tinian, “the Hiroshima bomb,” as Quint calls it, was of course part of the plan not only to defeat Japan in WWII, but also, as I explained here, to give the Soviets a great big scare. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was meant to demonstrate the military superiority of the American empire to the world. As we Marxists know, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, WWII was an inter-imperialist war between Anglo-American imperialism on one side and fascist imperialism on the other.

The nukes didn’t just kill between one and three hundred thousand Japanese; they were also an outrage against nature. The shark attacks, thus, are a symbolic revenge.

In the novel, after Hooper dies, Brody believes the shark can’t be killed and tells Quint he doesn’t think the town can pay him anymore. Quint, however, decides he’ll go after the shark with or without the money, so determined is he in his Ahab-like drive to kill it.

In the final confrontation, the shark attacks the Orca, causing it to sink. In the novel, after harpooning the shark several times, Quint gets his foot entangled in the rope of one of the harpoons he’s hit the shark with, and as the shark goes back into the water, Quint is pulled in with it and he drowns, in true Ahab fashion. All he’d have to say, to make it perfect, is, “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee…”

This link with Moby-Dick is feeble and anticlimactic compared to Quint’s spectacular death in the movie, since we know of his trauma from the Indianapolis incident being reawakened as he kicks in terror and slides down to the shark’s eager mouth to get that fatal bite in the belly.

While the shark’s confrontation with Brody in the novel is, again, anticlimactic, at least it’s more realistic than the spectacular blowup at the end of the movie. Benchley hated the changed killing of the shark so much that he got kicked off the set when they were to film it. Brody’s shoving of a pressurized tank into the shark’s mouth, then firing a bullet into the tank, would not have caused it and the shark to explode; still, Spielberg felt a more dramatic ending was more important than realism, and from the point of view of the movie’s commercial success, he was right.

As for the novel, though, the wounded shark moves closer and closer to Brody, who is afloat on a seat cushion now that the Orca has sunk, and he’s resigned to his fate. But the shark, right up close to him now, just…dies. It succumbs to its harpoon wounds, and sinks down to the ocean floor with Quint, his leg still stuck in the harpoon rope.

Then Brody, like sole-surviving Ishmael, starts swimming to shore–the end!

This is the way the novel ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Again, it’s not an exciting ending, it’s certainly an abrupt ending for the novel, but that was Benchley’s point. This is reality: people aren’t generally very nice (sorry, Dear Reader!), and problems aren’t normally solved in a dramatic, Hollywood fashion.

Jaws the movie is a great moment in cinematic history, to be sure, and is thoroughly entertaining, but it is so because it’s a capitalistic crowdpleaser. Jaws the novel, on the other hand, is an exploration of the darker, predatory nature of man as well as, if not much more so than, of sharks, of which the one in the novel is just a symbolic projection of ourselves.

Predictably, the phenomenon of the film led to the sale of Jaws-related merchandise as I mentioned above, as well as sequels that got worse and worse until being totally ridiculous. Then there were attempts to capitalize on marine animal terror with different movies, like Orca. So the first Jaws film may be justifiably far more beloved than the novel, but it also proved Benchley’s point about the predatory nature of capitalism.